WEBVTT

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there's nothing quite like new hardware the smell

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the feeling the how did this happen

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not only is this completely the wrong model of CPU it doesn't even fit in the

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motherboard that it's supposed to i mean

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you did everything right you knew the second-hand back-alley deal

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from craigslist joe was a bad idea and you bought it from a reputable store

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only to get the wrong thing anyway at least that's what happened if your

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reddit user merzeus who alleges that the

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ryzen 5 3600 that they bought from best buy is so fake that installing it would

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damage your system but how bad could it really be

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to find out we contacted merzus and actually bought the chip off of them so

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we could test it for ourselves you know what's not a risk though trying

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on the surface everything about merzus's CPU seemed normal the box was sealed the

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product intact and the laser markings on the ihs clearly said ryzen 3600. even

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the included sticker was right so far so

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good then right well no

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it appears that merzeus may have fallen victim to a scam that has been around as

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long as i've been making videos back in 2010 i actually covered a similar

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incident where a new egg customer received what appears to be a heat sink

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shaped piece of plaster with a picture of a CPU fan glued to it

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along with a picture of a CPU so the idea here then is pretty simple the

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thief somehow gets access to an individual box or even a full carton of

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product swaps the valuable stuff out with something convincing enough to fool

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an inattentive warehouse worker stashes the carton at the bottom of the pile and

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flips the real cpus and coolers on ebay by the time customers start complaining

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the scammer has probably moved on to their next grift but

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here's the thing there's no plaster here and

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i mean this is a real enough looking CPU

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isn't it how bad could it be

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ah to find out we must look closely

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for starters the culprit appears to have left a fingerprint on the bottom of the

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pre-applied thermal compound but

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we don't have a forensic lab so that's not going to do us a whole lot of good

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let's take a closer look at the chip itself then

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here is a real ryzen 5 3600 and if you

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look you'll notice that our fake one actually doesn't have nearly as many

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pins on the bottom of it not only that but there's some little gaps in the pins

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see that they're in completely different spaces

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these scammers clearly don't pay as much attention to the fine details as we do

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in our merch like this CPU shirt at lttstore.com

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but taking a closer look at our imposter 3600 what is it then

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some of you might recognize the old am3 layout which means that this could very

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well be a genuine AMD processor just

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an older one so what exactly is it then does it even

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work to find out we dusted off our old crosshair 5 formula motherboard and some

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ddr3 memory and threw on an rtx 2060

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super because just how bad could the bottleneck be

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right well

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that heatsink won't work that's the m4

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then we'll compound on here it's our 200

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CPU don't want to damage it anything like

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that oh full speed fan spin on the GPU

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not a great sign for your CPU actually working

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shave the finger hairs off this is not what we were expecting to

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happen actually we had it up and running yesterday ran cinebench counter strike

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um holy crap it's back alive i don't have

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the heatsink attached it turned on hold on hold on i want to get

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uh okay i just i pulled a classic

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a classic troubleshooting step um when you're having an issue with a

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cable or a connection don't just reseed it

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reseed it a few times because what that can do is it can actually scratch some

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of the any corrosion or um

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oxidation off of the surface of the contacts and it can make it so they'll

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make better uh they'll be more conductive um so i

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put CPU in and out a whole bunch of times and

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oh wow oh what a deal what a bargain

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we got us an athlon 2 x2 b22 CPU

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an 11 year old processor i mean this thing's almost old enough to drive

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uh cinebench let's find out how many oh wow oh

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did you do you see that

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now Windows 10 search is a steaming pile of garbage

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but that was something else okay oh oh lordy you put cinebench r20

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on here oh that's not going to be a good experience i mean

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that was just opening a folder is this an SSD

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this is an SSD this is a crucial bx i mean it's not a

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fast SSD but good lord that felt hard drive like

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oh this makes sense

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this makes sense not only is this a very old CPU

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but look at these temps we are running at 88 degrees with a tj max of 90. this

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thing is probably thermal throttling never mind probably we can see it

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dropping down to 800 megahertz here from time to time wait hold on is it i can't

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is it running yeah it's

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it's mounted on there oh there it goes there it goes there it goes that takes

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about half an hour to complete so i won't be sitting here staring at it the

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score is 162 we ran this beforehand and

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to put that in context the cinebench database has a ryzen 7

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1700x a core that gets 3455 that's first

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gen ryzen so this is like maybe 1 20th of the

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performance that we should have gotten if we're lucky let's play some video

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games cs go

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more like cs wait

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cs come on

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okay all right oh man this is rough because i i'm gonna

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play with bots which actually puts additional load on the CPU

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sorry poor CPU now all i was trying to do was like you

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know use microsoft office or whatever

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totally fine but i would expect to pay 200

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for the entire computer and like monitor

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not just the CPU that's the problem

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oh boy well i don't know if runs is the right

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word it's more of a jogging-like experience

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wow look at that they gunned that guy down oh reload oh do you see how long it

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took to start that reloading animation after it stopped actually firing

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headshot again look at this got my like auto aim on here

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got my hacks athlon 2 hacks i think it's time to stop

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and you whoever you are switching cpus out

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shame on you it's time for you to stop

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but you won't stop will you we've seen multiple anecdotes of people

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receiving the incorrect CPU with the heat spreader swapped so it looks like

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the right one just like this and let's show you guys how this scam

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works first you need to obtain an old crappy CPU

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kind of like this then you're going to need a de-litting

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tool we're using this one from derbauer well

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i guess you don't really need a delitting tool it just makes it easier

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if you have a razor blade or a vise and a lot of patience you can remove your

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ihs that way ihs is short for heat spreader

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really so whatever the last thing in the frame buffer was it's still

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outputting it this this has no CPU in it ladies and

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gentlemen hold on now i'm

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we're just gonna leave that there um oh shoot this isn't the version of

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the d-litting tool that formerly works with AMD cpus but we're

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gonna go for it anyway you can see the bolt

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doesn't reach because it doesn't go over the anyway the point is

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uh i'm just going to try and do this back right there what are you doing

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uh i'm just i'm doing it the manly way

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okay

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hold on okay you know what there's a vice here

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see you later

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okay

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and it's gone something to note is that yours might

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not come off this easily and i would not recommend deleting AMD cpus that have

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soldered ihss because the odds of getting a performance improvement are

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low and the odds of damaging it are significantly higher of course this one

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has clearly already been deleted once so it popped right off and you can see

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right here that these clearly don't match our CPU has a single die

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and our ihs actually has you can see where they

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scraped the existing solder off both the CPU die and the i o chip which are

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separate in amt russian cpus

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yeah to their credit though they did go and

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put some admittedly very crappy dry flaky thermal compound

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on this which sort of raises the question

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why why go to all this work when you could

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just ship a hunk of plaster

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well there are a few reasons for that first

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and foremost it's harder for a warehouse worker to identify the problem packages

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this way every single unit would need to be pulled and either carefully inspected or

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even hand tested also as we discussed in our fake

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aliexpress GPU video if the product works at least a little it can buy the

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scammer some time while the customer attempts to troubleshoot the fake device

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on marketplaces with third-party sellers for example that can delay the shutdown

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of their store allowing them to make more money in the meantime before they

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have to start over those graphics cards worked enough to at least boot into

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Windows for example which might buy them a week of going back and forth with the

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customer oh did you try new drivers etc etc

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now as for this CPU well i would say that it's possible an

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unwitting victim might try to force it into an am4 socket bending the pins in

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the process if they didn't know better they might think that they were guilty of

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destroying it rather than realizing that they had gotten a fake product i mean i

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wrote that earlier but i don't even know if i i i actually just don't really

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understand why they bothered putting all this work into it

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you know what i wonder if it's like a criminal code thing

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where if you wherever they're from maybe if you ship the wrong thing as opposed

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to just a brick it's like you could yeah there's

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plausible deniability or something like that it's got to be something like that

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because this is not insignificant amount of work

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the good news is that because AMD is pga

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or pin grid array the risk to your motherboard and the rest of your

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components is minimal and given that an athlon x2 these days is worth about

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five to ten dollars it's not much of a loss but if this was an Intel product

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and you had tried to install it without realizing the problem you could easily

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have damaged your motherboard and nobody wants the headache of explaining why

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they should be allowed to return their motherboard with bent pins when they are

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already trying to return their fake CPU

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so with all that out of the way while we know that mirzeus ended up with

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a scam CPU from best buy what we don't know is how let's talk through the

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possibilities i can say with confidence that best buy

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the organization had nothing to do with this these kinds of incidents can have

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devastating negative pr effects and realistically they're going to have to

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ship a working CPU to the customer eventually so why bother putting in all

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this work beyond that well hard to say

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a worker at best buys distributor that's possible but security in those

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places tends to be crazy tight so i doubt it a best buy retail employee

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that's another possibility theft from retail workers is a significant problem

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i remember this team at ncix that worked together actually a customer would come

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in walk around the store browse for a bit interact with the staff and then

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after a little while an employee who was

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an associate obviously would call out a bogus ticket number and then the

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customer would walk up to the counter take a bag of hardware and walk right

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out the door i mean everyone's busy you don't notice the gear missing until the

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monthly count or whatever so it's really hard to pick up on something like that

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especially when the security footage looks so normal and especially if that

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rogue employee eventually returned the thing back to the shelf but in an

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altered state what about a courier

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that's possible couriers do have unsupervised access to packages but the

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outer carton is often shipped with tamper-proof tape and they're almost

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always under video surveillance as controversial as that particular issue

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might be on top of that opening someone else's mail is a federal offence in the u.s

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probably not worth the 200 bucks that they stand to make here i'd say a more

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realistic scenario is a previous customer might have bought the chip

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swapped out the real one packed it back up nicely and returned it to best buy

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who put it back on the shelf thinking everything looked okay

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which kind of leads us to a couple more uncomfortable possibilities

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merzouz lives in sri lanka best buy doesn't ship to sri lanka so

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actually the CPU was shipped to merzouz's brother in maryland who then

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forwarded it now i don't know the guy

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and i wouldn't accuse him of any wrongdoing but

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since we're talking about possibilities it is technically possible that his

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brother was involved in this and while we're at it it's also possible

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that mirzeus is in on it if that were the case though i don't

00:15:57.040 --> 00:16:04.320
think a refund from best buy was really the agenda because if so why bother

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shipping it to sri lanka first it is possible however that they wanted

00:16:06.079 --> 00:16:12.000
some reddit clout and this seemed like an easy way to stir up some outrage

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i have no reason to believe that's what happened and if i did i wouldn't have

00:16:13.440 --> 00:16:20.720
given merzus 200 to buy a new CPU and give me this one but

00:16:18.000 --> 00:16:25.600
i've seen much more appalling stunts than that so maybe i'm just cynical but

00:16:23.519 --> 00:16:29.360
it is possible you know what else is possible

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sometimes ordering cpus is like a box of

00:17:26.400 --> 00:17:32.559
chocolates you never know what you're gonna get

00:17:30.720 --> 00:17:36.640
if you guys had fun with this video make sure you check out our testing out

00:17:34.320 --> 00:17:40.320
mystery chinese cpus video or actually you might also enjoy our fake gpus video

00:17:38.640 --> 00:17:44.000
from aliexpress that's a good one too we'll have those linked down below